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From: kent@parc.xerox.com
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Grumpy about Dopey Window Systems...
Message-ID: <91Feb6.105354pst.3142@thrale.parc.xerox.com>
Date: 6 Feb 91 18:53:40 GMT
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Well, yes. LOOPS was wonderful. The Lispms were/are pretty wonderful,
too. Smalltalk was/is great. Cedar is fairly wonderful in many ways.
Hypercard is fairly wonderful in some ways, but not nearly as nice as
its inspirations.

Is there a common thread here? Yes, I think so: they're all highly
integrated systems that were created by a person or a small group of
people with a tight vision, high energy, and a lot of cycles. (Most of
them are also single-address-space systems, which is a bad idea but a
great implementation environment.) 

X is a system that's waiting to have that kind of energy poured into
it. So far, all we've really had is a baroque toolkit design and a lot
of corporate jingoism and positioning for market share. Trestle seems
to have promise as a complete rethinking of the toolkit layer. Tcl is
another step in the right direction, even though I don't care for the
language that is used (all the power of the csh with all the
flexibility of the csh, to slightly twist an oft-quoted phrase).

By all means, let's keep this discussion going. But the answer lies in
the doing; some person or group of people has to dig in, throw away,
and rebuild. Doing it in a multiple address space environment just
makes the problem that much more interesting.

chris